Tabula Rasa

It's a well-known--though perhaps apocryphal--fact that Reiner Knizia
develops his games in threes. There is his 'tile-laying
trilogy'--Euphrat & Tigris, Durch die Wüste and Samurai; his
'auction trilogy'--Modern Art, Medici and Ra; and his 'multiple
paths to victory' trilogy--Stephensons Rocket, Taj Mahal and The
Merchants of Amsterdam. When Lost Cities came out,
then, it was just a matter of digging around to find its relatives. It
doesn't take any more than a glance at the short rulebook
to this game to instantly recognize Tabula Rasa as one of them. (For
the record, the third in this particular trilogy is Schotten-Totten.)

The theme of Tabula Rasa apparently involves knights contesting regions
of England, and it all looks very medieval; but the
fact is that--like most games from Reiner Knizia--the theme is
paper-thin and really doesn't enter into the gameplay at all. I'm
going to ignore the theme in my description, as you doubtless will when
you play it.

The game consists of fifty cards--two each numbered 1 to 5 in five
suits--and several tiles, worth from 1 to 5 points. It is the
tiles which players are trying to capture, with the biggest sum of tiles
determining the eventual victor. Five of the tiles are
coloured, the same as the card suits, and are worth five points each.
Five more tiles are not coloured, and have points that
vary from one to five. In the two-player game--which is how the game is
usually played--all ten tiles are laid in a row between
the players. On your turn, you play a card in front of one of the ten
tiles, then draw a replacement card, if there are any left.
The game ends when both players are out of cards. Each tile is then won
by the player who had the most cards played in
front of it. The highest sum of tile points wins. And that's the
entire game.

Well, almost. There's one restriction on how you play your cards--you
can't put any old card in front of any tile. This is where
the tiles' numbers and colours come in to it. Say you have a blue
three card in your hand. You can play this card to either
the blue tile (worth five points) or the three tile (worth three points).
Nowhere else. This is where the delightful Knizia-esque
dilemma comes into the picture. It means that you have to plan your
placements carefully to beat your opponent while
keeping your options open at the same time. Because there are a fixed
quantity of cards of each colour and of each number,
your opponent also has a pretty good idea of what's winnable and
what's not. And you can bet this information will be used
against you. (To a point. Card-counting isn't infallible in Tabula Rasa
because two cards have been removed from the deck
sight-unseen before the game.)

Another thing you should keep in mind is that there is a prize for
second place in each of the ten columns. The player with
the second-most number of cards played in front of a tile earns a
one-point consolation prize--even if it was from playing just
one card. If two players tie for first, both players get just one point.
The final scoring opportunity encourages you to go for the
less lucrative number tiles, rather than the five-point colour tiles:
counting from the one-point tile to the five-point tile, the first
player to win two of them outright (this could be no one if there
are draws) gets a five-point bonus. These balances make it
only slightly more lucrative to go for the colour tiles than the number
tiles, but then both players know that, so any advantage
is cancelled out.

As a two-player game, Tabula Rasa feels a lot like Schotten-Totten,
and a little like Lost Cities--you don't want to commit a
card yet, but you have to before you can draw another card. Information
is very precious, and the longer you can deny it from
your opponent, the better shot you have at winning. Where Tabula Rasa
has a big plus over its two siblings is that it can be
played as a three-player game--with just the same rules--and loses none of
its charm or playability. (There are also
four-player partnership rules which I am not so thrilled with.)
Schotten-Totten is strictly two-player, and while Lost Cities has
three- and four-player variants, they feel like quite different games to
me than the original.

Tabula Rasa is produced by one of the smaller game companies, but it
has not lost any production quality from this; the
cards are still strong and thick, and the tiles are healthy chunks of
cardboard that are never going to bend. The artwork is a
little repetitive and boring, but since this card game doesn't really
have much of a theme, I don't perceive this as a significant
loss. Tabula Rasa is perhaps the least known of its trilogy of
influence-based card games, but I think it is certainly as good
as its relations--indeed better in some aspects--and definitely worth a look.